Japanese animation films and series have enjoyed high popularity in the last decade, thanks to the arrival of multimedia on the Internet, Japanese content has spread throughout the world, with different solutions to consume them appearing in the same way. Now crunchyroll.com wants to establish itself as a platform for streaming anime, with a free model with advertising and two other premium options free of ads and with higher quality. It also offers a free 14-day trial that you can benefit from.
The 3 subscription plans of the crunchyroll platform
Most likely, to see and understand the virtues of this platform, you start your free subscription to crunchyroll, with this you will have the right to a limited catalog of series, and you will have ads in each chapter, the advertising can jump at the beginning or in the middle of the viewing, in the purest Youtube style. The streaming quality for the free version is 480p, a sufficient quality to watch anime online.
The Premum plan at € 4,99 per month, gives you the possibility of accessing the entire catalog of the platform, and the latest episodes will be available only 1 hour after they premiere in Japan. Obviously we will not have the annoying advertising and streaming quality goes up to 720 and 1080p, this mode also includes technical support with priority response and discounts in the crunchyroll online store.
Finally we find the Premium + subscription option that for a price of € 8.99 per month offers us the same as the conventional Premium subscription with some extras, which I sincerely do not recommend, free shipping only in the US, being able to participate in exclusive contests, premium virtual badge, and other attributes with little added value that make the € 4 difference not worth it.
The platforms that I can view and use crunchyroll on
The platforms compatible with crunchyroll are many, the company has invested in technology and has managed to bring its apps to practically everything that people use the most today. In addition to on PC, Mac or Linux through the browser, we can enjoy the contents in Android, IOS, Windows Phone, Xbox 360, XBox One, Play Station 3, Play Station 4, Play Station Vita, Wii U, Chromecast, Apple TV and Roku Box. A great offer to enjoy anime on our favorite device.
The crunchyroll catalog
The crunchyroll catalog, we must admit that it is quite good, other platforms dedicated to anime have appeared recently, but they are not as strong as this one, which has been dedicated to buying licenses, reaching deals with several companies and getting investors like Otter Media or TV Tokyo.
The current crunchyroll catalog has more than 200 titles, with subtitles in several languages. Among its ranks we can find such popular series as Naruto Shippuden, Fairy Tail, The Testament of Sister New Devil, World Trigger, Mobile Suit GUNDAM Iron Blooded Orphans, Comet Lucifer, Hunter x Hunter or Ushio and Tora. and on the website we can check the premiere calendar, to keep up to date with the news.
The legitimacy of this anime platform
The platform works within the law, since currently crunchyroll has been dedicated to acquiring licenses in different countries and has the support of Japanese studios, publishers and networks that protect them, Aniplex, Nippon Television Network, Kadokawa Pictures or Shueisha are some of the firms that accompany and support them. If a series is licensed in your country and crunchyroll has paid for the license, you can enjoy it on the platform, if, on the contrary, the series is not licensed, it can be included in the catalog as long as the author agrees.
Crunchyroll appeared in 2006 and began to draw especially on the work of fansubs, associations of people who subtitle anime into different languages as a hobby. In its first years of life, it did not respect the law, and published content without having the legislation, it was not until 2010 that it began to legalize its businesses and remove from its platform all kinds of content that was not legal.
The fansubs have carried out a task outside the law, praised by many and criticized by others. Outside of this discussion, great merit must be attributed to these communities, that of having shared these contents all over the world, otherwise the national publishers would not have paid for them and they would never have reached our countries.
Once again, we have a fight for the subscriber on our hands, Waki and Netflix do not focus on the Japanese content that so many like, but they also present war with their North American series. After the battle against piracy that has been fought this last year in Spain, the terrain is now at one of its most favorable points for platforms such as crunchyroll, daisuki, WakiTV or netflix to bid to be our main entertainment provider. There is no doubt that the content has to be paid for, the author has to benefit, the editor has to earn a living, and so we can list all the professionals involved in the production chain of an anime. But users want a universal service at a fair price and it seems that in this war for content that is inexorably approaching, neither side is going to have a complete catalog.
Access the crunchyroll.com platform here